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by extr 1254 days ago
Actually, if you're interested at all, I just, after literally months of reading about this, found a pretty sick solution.

Have you ever heard of Phoenix? https://github.com/kasper/phoenix/. Despite googling around for this exact topic, with 3.8k stars I had never heard of it. Apparently someone has created slim, JS scriptable interface that is basically tailor made toward creating your own tiling WM. I just installed it and loaded one of the examples: https://github.com/nik3daz/spin2win. And what it does is basically ignores the built-in spaces and creates truly virtual desktops by just hiding and resizing windows. And it works pretty well. The response time between switching "desktops" is basically instant.
1 comments
idle_zealot 1254 days ago
I had not heard of Phoenix, and it looks interesting. Though I doubt I would be able to do a better job of reimplementing sway/i3 in Javascript than the folks working on yabai have managed.
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extr 1254 days ago
So, you don't have to. Check out that spin2win "example" I linked, it's really less of an example and more of a pretty fleshed out implementation of XMonad. I don't really know javascript/TS at all and I was able to get it running with a few tweaks in 20 minutes or so. Phoenix is super intuitive.

I'll admit it is a little bit janky (which the author admits/warns about). But it seriously does work better than yabai. This config (using Phoenix) basically abandons the native "Spaces" functionality and does everything by just maintaining an internal window state and moving windows around fast. So you don't have to disable SIP (a big thing for me, since I want to use this at work). I'm seriously kind of blown away, this is miles better than apps that people are paying for, and it was just sitting here in this guy's github fork.

It is super disappointing this is the best that Mac can do though. There is no reason there shouldn't be a mostly-native (ie, less janky) tiling wm solution on the platform.

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idle_zealot 1254 days ago
Well that's the thing, I don't want an xmonad replacement; I'm not a fan of automatic tiling. I much prefer manual tiling a la i3. I looked through the Phoenix examples and didn't find something that worked how I wanted, so I'd be left implementing it myself. The reimplementation of Spaces by hiding/unhiding windows does sound like a nice trick that Amethyst and yabai should adopt though.
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